The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

Since 2014, international monetary agencies have been issuing warnings to a small group of finance ministers, banks, and private equity funds: The US government's cowardly choices not to prosecute J.P. Morgan and its ilk and to bloat the economy with a $4 trillion injection of easy credit are driving us headlong toward a cliff. As Rickards shows in this frightening, meticulously researched book, governments around the world have no compunction about conspiring against their citizens.

Amazon Customer says:"worth reading for those interested in economics"

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

Dr. Mohamed A. El-Erian, one of the world's most influential economic thinkers and the author of When Markets Collide, has written a road map to what lies ahead and the decisions we must make now to stave off the next global economic and financial crisis. Our current economic path is coming to an end. The signposts are all around us: sluggish growth, rising inequality, stubbornly high pockets of unemployment, and jittery financial markets, to name a few. Soon we will reach a fork in the road.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

When Genius Failed is the cautionary financial tale of our time, the gripping saga of what happened when an elite group of investors believed they could actually deconstruct risk and use virtually limitless leverage to create limitless wealth. In Roger Lowenstein's hands, it is a brilliant tale peppered with fast money, vivid characters, and high drama.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy

Something is wrong with our banking system. We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his 10 years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy, he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking, the keys to modern finance.

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

Sebastian Mallaby's magisterial biography of Alan Greenspan, the product of over five years of research based on untrammeled access to his subject and his closest professional and personal intimates, brings into vivid focus the mysterious point where the government and the economy meet. To understand Greenspan's story is to see the economic and political landscape of the last 30 years - and the presidency, from Reagan to George W. Bush - in a whole new light.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

isaiah says:"The book is a great review of how we got to where we are today"

The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders

Some traders distinguish themselves from the herd. These supertraders make millions of dollars - sometimes in hours - and consistently outperform their peers. As he did in his acclaimed national best seller, Market Wizards, Jack Schwager interviews a host of these supertraders, spectacular winners whose success occurs across a spectrum of financial markets. These traders use different methods, but they all share an edge. How do they do it? What separates them from the others? What can they teach the average trader or investor?

Endgame: The End of The Debt Supercycle And How It Changes Everything

Hundreds of books have been written about the financial crisis that engulfed the world after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. But what if the bigger financial crisis is ahead of us, not behind us?As John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper deftly illustrate in this controversial audio book, the crisis was more than a half-century in the making. The Great Financial Crisis, however, was merely Act I.

Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism

A sharp and illuminating history of one of capitalism's longest-running tensions - the conflicts of interest among public-company directors, managers, and shareholders - told through entertaining case studies and original letters from some of our most legendary and controversial investors and activists.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World

Shaped by his 25 years traveling the world and enlivened by encounters with tycoons, presidents, and villagers from Rio to Beijing, Ruchir Sharma's The Rise and Fall of Nations rethinks the "dismal science" of economics as a practical art. Narrowing the thousands of factors that can shape a country's fortunes to 10 clear rules, Sharma explains how to spot political, economic, and social changes in real time. He shows how to read political headlines, black markets, the price of onions, and billionaire rankings as signals of booms, busts, and protests.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and Confusion

Charles Mackay covers many types of delusions, among them financial manias like the South Sea Company bubble of 1711-1720, the Mississippi Company bubble of 1719-1720, and the Dutch tulip mania of the early 17th century. According to Mackay, during this bubble, speculators from all walks of life bought and sold tulip bulbs and even futures contracts on them.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Forty years ago Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred systematically when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made Michael Lewis' work possible.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for The Thoughtful Investor

Howard Marks, the chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, is renowned for his insightful assessments of market opportunity and risk. After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career.

Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor

Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway's visionary vice chairman and Warren Buffett's indispensable financial partner, has outperformed market indexes again and again, and he believes any investor can do the same. His notion of "elementary, worldly wisdom" - a set of interdisciplinary mental models involving economics, business, psychology, ethics, and management - allows him to keep his emotions out of his investments and avoid the common pitfalls of bad judgment.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

First published in 1923, this lightly fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of the greatest market speculators ever, is widely regarded as one of best investment books of all time. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is the resource that generations of investors have turned to when they needed deeper insight into their own investing habits and those of others. Listen to this work, featuring narrator Rick Rohan, and you'll soon discover your portfolio growing in new and unexpected ways!

The New Case for Gold

James Rickards is the most visible, vocal, and intelligent proponent for the gold standard today, and his unwavering stance on gold's value has drawn him hordes of lifelong fans. In The New Case for Gold, Rickards explains why gold is one of the safest assets for investors in times of political instability and market volatility and how every investor should look to add gold to his or her portfolio.

Code Red: How to Protect Your Savings from the Coming Crisis

Written by the New York Times best-selling author team of John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper, Code Red spills the beans on the central banks in the U.S., U.K., E.U., and Japan and how they've rigged the game against the average saver and investor. More importantly, it shows you how to protect your hard-earned cash from the bankers' disastrous monetary policies and how to come out a winner in the irresponsible game of chicken they're playing with the global financial system.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places

Since its first publication, Michael J. Mauboussin's popular guide to wise investing has been translated into eight languages and has been named best business book by BusinessWeek and best economics book by Strategy+Business. Now updated to reflect current research and expanded to include new chapters on investment philosophy, psychology, and strategy and science as they pertain to money management.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger - all by the time he was 30. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe

In The Euro, Nobel Prize-winning economist and best-selling author Joseph E. Stiglitz dismantles the prevailing consensus around what ails Europe, demolishing the champions of austerity while offering a series of plans that can rescue the continent - and the world - from further devastation. Hailed by its architects as a lever that would bring Europe together and promote prosperity, the euro has done the opposite. As Stiglitz persuasively argues, the crises revealed the shortcomings of the euro.

The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath

In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however - the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown.

All the Devils Are Here

As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers? According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, the real answer is all of the above-and more. Many devils helped bring hell to the economy.

Publisher's Summary

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing - and recovering - their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different" - claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. This book proves that premise wrong.

Covering 66 countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes - from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much - or how little - we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts - as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises.

While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. This Time Is Different exposes centuries of financial missteps.

What the Critics Say

"This Time Is Different doesn't simply explain what went wrong in our most recent crisis. This book also provides a roadmap of how things are likely to pan out in the years to come....This Time Is Different is an important addition to the literature of financial history." (Wall Street Journal)

This book has a funny title, This Time is Different, but as you read it, it will become plain why it is appropriate. Because, as the authors argue very effectively, everytime an economy has been on the verge of a bubble, and a precious few prognosticators are calling it, the mass of investors say, "this time is different." Certainly true of the present bubble (or the present aftermath) and of 10s and 100s before.

This book is also approachable for the non-economist (I am an economist) if you skip the chunks that the authors themselves recommend you skip in the early parts. That is harder to do with an audiobook, but it can be done (the audiobook is sectioned).

I gave this book 3 stars not because it is bad, or mediocre, but because the actual book is laden with tables and charts. To do it justice I found it necessary to listen to it and look at the book every once in awhile to see the figures (it helped that my employer's research library had a copy). When the narrator, who is good, tries to relate what is in the tables and charts, things get ponderous.

I highly recommend the book. The audiobook is a good complement to it, or vice versa. The audiobook alone is what gets the 3 stars.

What a great book - really puts a lot of tendencies in the economics of the day into a historical perspective. In this respect, it really clears a lot of fog and makes many things clear. However, this book has a very large amount of diagrams and charts which not only illustrate the text, but develop its ideas in a graphical form. Without these graphs the book sounds weird with constant referrals to the stuff you can not see. More so, parts of text - historical anecdotal chunks of data - are simply omitted... So, before spending your credits, find an e-book somewhere on the net - without this aid you are only getting 50% of this book, which is a pity, as this book, being a quite serious research, is, at the same time, is instantly accessible even to a humble armchair economist like myself.

I had to buy this book from Amazon because I tried listening to it and it's nearly impossible. There are references to charts and formulas that are referred to constantly, not just once in a while. This is an important book and very accessible to the modern lay reader, but not a good book in Audible format.

The print version of this book would make for an excellent text for future MBA candidates. Unfortunately, it makes for a poor audiobook for the rest of us.
This work is highly admirable for its scope and rigor. However it's far too pedantic and lacking in narrative to accommodate the audio format.
In fact, it might be too pedantic and lacking in narrative for any non-academic setting.
I say that well aware of the fact that some bookish folk will find that the post-doctoral feel suits them. Be that as it may, the extreme over-reliance on tables disqualifies this work as an audiobook, I think most everybody will agree.

As I listened to a narrator say the words "On table..." or, "In graph...," again, I knew I had selected the wrong book. The authors freely admit that they have avoided a narrative approach as to why economies of small and large scale fall into the same boom and bust cycles. Instead they have relied upon a visual approach, using tables and graphs for the presentation of their arguments and analysis.

While the premise of the tome is intriguing, without a hard copy or e-book of the original text, this is a poor translation to the aural format.

This material is 5-star excellent with good narration, but you should buy the physical book as there are many references to charts and tables, so the format gets 2 stars. I listen to audiobooks during my daily commute, so I did not get to see the material referenced.

The content of the book is great with its long historical view on souvereign debt defaults. After hearing the audiobook it is clear to me that the current developments in Greece etc are not a unique events.

I agree with previous reviews that the audiobook format was very bad. The references to tables and charts gets the listener out of track. Audible and/or the authors should have edited the text before making it into an audiobook.
Therefore:
Grade for content: 5 stars
Grade for format: 0 (zero) stars
All in all: 2 stars

If you compare table 1.2a with 1.2b you will see that the period spent in crisis by developing countries after a sovereign default is comparable to... on the other hand, if you want an audiobook that whiles away the hours of gardening you probably want something more like Malcolm Gladwell.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

James

London, United Kingdom

11/20/11

Overall

"Not for the general reader"

Be warned: this is a good book but very clearly an academic text not intended for the general reader. I get the feeling that the publishers may have rushed this out to cash in on all the post financial crisis books. It is a shame as it has a really interesting story to tell and would have benefited from a different edition - indeed book - aimed at the general reader with far less emphasis on data and statistics. (Underemployed journalists take note!). Another problem is that the book relies on sets of charts and data that can't be read out loud as they would be a nonsense. I do think the audible / publishers need to think about this a bit more, perhaps at least provide a PDF to download of the charts maybe?

However it is a good book and if I were reading the paper version it would have got a better rating!

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Gøril

Oslo, Norway

2/13/13

Overall

"A great Economics book, unfortunately without data"

Tis is a really interesting, in-depth study of financial, currency and debt crises. It is possible to follow the content in an audiobook, but it is unfortunate that one can only imagine the graphs and tables that are referred to. Would it not be possible to download these as PDFs together with the audiobook?

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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